Social Selling with LinkedIn

Social Selling will be a relatively new concept for some, but it is a natural fusion between enrichment and the ability to commercialize. Commercialization is amongst others the ability to find the appropriate decision-makers in a company both in the first and second degree. This implies that the sender has built up trust and credibility within their network and groups, and is therefore able to directly book a meeting or invite someone to a morning seminar. It is also important that this platform is used to prepare meetings and for ongoing lead generation.

Enrichment is the ability to create value, without necessarily spending money. Enrichment can, for example, come in the form of articles, reports, good tips, videos, invitations to seminars and morning meetings. Through our connections and the groups we may be a part of on LinkedIn comes the impetus to create value, and ensure enrichment, which occur in communication through dialogue. This further brings its own unique competitive advantage.

In order to succeed in social selling, insight into your personal network’s challenges and preferences requires sincere interest as part of your commercial profile. Do you have this? If not, it is very difficult to achieve positive positioning in the mind of the recipient, both in the short and long term. This positioning ultimately determines whether you and the company are included as possible supplier when decision-makers in your network are searching.

This is how you get through

The volume of content found on LinkedIn now, and in the future, requires filtering and sophisticated processing if the individual recipient is going to feel the value of what you send out. Therefore, the decision-makers are going to become more and more selective about who is included in their personal network. Keep in mind that social selling on LinkedIn is to a large extent reliant on the fact that we can write directly to our connections and create value. This in turn assumes that people are 1st degree connections. If you as a connection don’t have the aptitude for creating enrichment, your content can quickly be regarded as noise in a world where everyone is shouting louder and louder in a fight for a place in the consciousness of decision-makers; a world where the time needed to invest focus in a potential value is also in short supply. The consequence of being perceived as “noise” and non-enriching is that you can quickly be removed as a connection.

When did you last experience professional value from something you received in your LinkedIn inbox, when the sender wasn’t just promoting their own products or sharing stories about how fantastic it is to work at their company? When did you last feel that your connection had a sincere interest in extending professional inspiration, without an obvious motive, and which could actually be transformed into concrete actions within your company?

Through enrichment, you can create strong connections and ambassadors in the market. It is from there that commercialization can come into the picture- the product that your network can buy. If your connections have had a positive experience with you on LinkedIn through the contact, enrichment and dialog, isn’t it more likely that they will look to you when they do need a supplier? See, that’s the strongest impetus for social selling.